The GIF Keyboard Is Still the Default

2026

Dr Fauci, wash your hands. Three years after the unwind, this exact iconic GIPHY reaction is still one tap away in every iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack composer. Place: iOS · Android · Slack · Discord · Microsoft Teams · WhatsApp · Signal · Telegram Figures: approximately 10 billion GIFs served per day across Giphy and Tenor combined Three years after the Meta-Giphy unwind (see [[giphy-unwound-2023]]) and four years after Wilhite's death (see [[steve-wilhite-dies-2022]]), the GIF keyboard is still the default animated-image picker in every major messaging platform on earth. iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Telegram, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger — all of them ship with a GIF tab in the composer, all of them route to Giphy or Tenor or both, all of them call the result a GIF regardless of whether the underlying bytes are GIF, WebP (see [[webp-overtakes-gif-2022]]), or short MP4. Giphy (Shutterstock-owned) and Tenor (Google-owned) together serve, on the available 2025 disclosures, approximately 10 billion animated images per day. The format is not the cultural primary; the format is the infrastructure.